What Are Website Popup Surveys And How To Use Them?

A Website Popup Survey is sometimes also referred to as an on-site or on-page survey. These are, naturally, surveys you run directly on your website and often relating to the content on hand. There are multiple types available with popup surveys being the most effective.

Introduction

Website popup surveys allow you to collect feedback from your visitors directly, understand their behavior and motivations and find out how they respond to your content or offer.

A website popup survey requires minimal effort to complete, it does not disturb the visitor with a new browser window opening, nor does it direct the visitor away to a different page, in contrast to website intercept surveys.

The visitor can merely answer a short question on the side or leave a comment. No personal information is required hence the visitor is more likely to respond if they are concerned with privacy.

Generally, the potential for collecting feedback with website surveys is significantly larger than with other survey types, especially since it doesn’t require an email database to distribute.

Showing the survey to all visitors on your website means you can expect hundreds of results quickly (although we do not recommend it, more on that later).

How can I benefit from using website popup surveys?

Website surveys can fill in where google analytics cant – they can help you understand why visitors behave as they do.

They can be used in many ways, to find out why visitors are doing actions you expected them to, or to generate leads. Below you can find some potential use cases:

What makes a successful website popup survey?

They must be easy to understand and presented at the right moment, which leads us to the second factor crucial in a successful survey, which is utilizing targeting.

A crucial factor of a successful website survey is asking the right questions at the right time. So not only does the question have to be appropriately phrased (take a look at 20 most popular website survey questions) it also has to be appropriately targeted.

Website popup surveys can be targeted to show to a specific group of website visitors. For example, Survicate provides targeting capabilities listed below:

on a page URL – you can set the website survey to appear only on a certain page or pages

based on new or returning visitors (possibility to show surveys to users returning for the X’th time)

based on browser language and geography

based on device – mobile, desktop or both

based on specific behavior: time on page, % of the scroll or exit intent.

Using those options, you can precisely choose who and when will see the popup survey. It allows you to personalize the message by combining targeting options.

Here’s a simple example: You can ask visitors that are landing from a partner page about what services they are expecting to find.

If a visitor spent a significant amount of time on your page, you can ask them if they would be interested in a demo call.

If you run a SaaS company, you can ask new users what industry they come from or what other SaaS tools they use, while visitors that are returning for the 5th time see a question asking about features they would want to see.

How many answers will I collect?

Usually, Survicate users report response rates between 3 and 5% without using targeting. However, when targeting options are fully utilized, response rates can be as high as 58% (post-purchase surveys typically get the most responses).

When targeting is not used, and all visitors see a survey right after landing on your website, response rates stay at around 1%. Hence we discouraged it earlier.

Of course, the number of answers also depends on the traffic to the website – a highly trafficked website will collect more answers with a response rate of 1% than a small website with a response rate of 60%.

We recommend experimenting with targeting and some more advanced options rather than showing a survey to all visitors entering the website – this provides a higher quality of collected insight and better user experience for visitors who see only relevant questions.

To make sure you use the right questions and targeting options, think hard about what feedback is most valuable and what kind of targets can give it to you.

Play around with targeting to see which settings provide the highest response rates so you’ll be able to maximize the number of collected answers.

What to do with the collected data?

The key to a successful website survey is analyzing the data obtained with a popup and taking appropriate actions, otherwise running website popup surveys won’t benefit you much.

When you collect a meaningful dataset (in most of cases, 50-100 answers are enough to spot trends) analyze the responses and draw some conclusions. Then turn conclusions into decisions.

If the results suggest that something should be changed on the website, implement a change and observe the results. This method will net the best effects and secure a full utilization of your website survey tool.

Furthermore, you can use integrations to send collected data to a CRM, marketing automation, or an analytical tool like Google Analytics. What’s in it for you?

Using the integration with Google Analytics, you can build custom segments based on visitors answers. Custom segments can be used for more in-depth analysis as well as building retargeting lists.

Who can benefit from running website surveys

In smaller companies, often owners or marketing specialists use website popup surveys – not a big surprise as we all know that working in a small company requires multitasking. Such companies can use website popup surveys to gather useful insight into their offer, website usability, design, etc.

Since changes can be implemented quickly, the owner can perform them themselves. If they hired a good marketer he will often be responsible for minor changes to the website and communication strategies, so insights help them get their jobs done.

But who can use and benefit from website surveys at big companies with a strict division of responsibilities and tasks?

Conversion rate optimization specialists

What’s included in a toolbox of a conversion specialist? Usually, an analytical tool like Google Analytics, A/B testing tools like Optimizely, heat maps like CrazyEgg and session recordings like Fullstory (we have an amazing integration available).

They give you a full understanding of what is happening on the website. But you still don’t know why it is happening.

This is what website popup surveys help you uncover. Ask visitors why they are leaving, how they assess your value proposition, what stops them from buying, how do they feel about the design etc. to get a full understanding of your website visitors’ behavior.

Turn answers into A/B tests and increase the conversion rates of the website you manage.

Tip: look for a tool integrated with Optimizely or another A/B testing tool to be able to collect feedback on specific variants of your tests.

Product managers

Building a product roadmap is a huge challenge that can decide whether a product or venture is going to be successful or not. It’s challenging to balance the needs of current customers with what potential customer want and a long-term vision of a product.

Collecting feedback from existing and potential customers can help you set priorities.

Don’t just guess what they expect from you and implement features blindly. Find out what they can be interested in and how important this is for them.

This will lead to better adoption of new features and less time wasted on building features people don’t need.

Support managers

How much time did you spend creating materials for your support center? You should be. But it’s difficult to cover everything users can be looking for.

Also, you don’t know whether available materials answer all questions readers have about a specific issue. So use website surveys to find it out and improve the quality of support materials if needed.

Content specialists

How do you source ideas for your next posts? I bet you use tools like Buzzsumo to find trending topics, use a skyscraper technique, or just come up with ideas based on assumed expected needs of your target audience. But aren’t you overlooking one excellent source of ideas?

I’m talking about your readers. They often know what they want to read about. So use website popup survey to listen to their ideas and create tailored content.

Also, you can use website surveys to collect feedback on your articles – how readers assess them, what elements they found useful and what they want you to improve, etc. Result? Better content and higher satisfaction of users, which leads to more loyal readers and more social shares.

UX specialists

Designing a good UX of a website or an app requires many tests. If you’re serious about UX, I’m sure you start usability tests from early mockups or even before that (hint: get a few people to test interfaces of your competition to look for strong and weak points).

But small-scale lab tests won’t show all the mistakes and problems user’s face. They can be only revealed by some real users.

While heat maps and session recordings will do most of the job, website popup surveys will fill in the blanks and help you find ideas for improvements, understand why people interact with the design in a certain way, and what causes them problems.

In short, popup website surveys are the best method of collecting valuable insight with the help of your website. Their unobtrusiveness will always work in your favor and the potential for insights collected is limited only by a small wall to decipher with creativity and smartness.

But the benefits, both the instant and the ones you have to work for, are somewhat unmeasurable as they will go as far as you are willing to take them. Give a website survey tool a trial run to get a feel for it.